That's an inefficiency, too. There's a thing call
fiscal multipliers, where economists estimate the effect on GDP of any change in government spending (whether a tax increase/tax decrease or spending increase/decrease). Obviously it's not perfect, but we can get a ballpark idea of each options effectiveness.
e.g. some possible tax changes have a high or low fiscal multiplier. The Bush Tax Cuts had a fiscal multiplier of ~0.30, meaning a $1 tax cut only stimulates another 30 cents in GDP. Whereas a Payroll Tax Cut had a fiscal multiplier of ~1.30. So, any
rational person who wants to use tax cuts to stimulate growth should reject the Bush Tax Cuts and implement Payroll Tax Cuts. This is where you can skewer the bullshit of the "trickle down tax cuts" people: by choose tax breaks for billionaires instead of workers, you're deliberately
slowing the economy down to favor the megarich's immediate bank balance.
In fact, the most stimulatory policy is food stamps (fiscal multiplier of 1.73 in 2008). Basically, pure economic rationalism, devoid of favoritism suggests that the only sane course of action if you care about the deficit / debt, is that you
increase taxation on anything where fiscal multipliers are low,
decrease taxation on anything where fiscal multipliers are high,
increase spending on anything with a high fiscal multiplier, and
decrease spending on anything with a low fiscal multiplier. You don't even have to argue that "feeding people is the right thing to do", the economics speaks for itself. Just keep doing that and things will sort themselves out. Yet politically, they do almost the opposite of this.